Source: Law & Liberty
by Gordon Dakota Arnold
“One of the perennial questions of political philosophy is the relationship between man and nature. Is nature fundamentally hostile to life, or does it — instead — make all we cherish worthwhile? For all their disagreements, thinkers as different as Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau all saw man’s relationship with nature as a fundamental, perhaps the fundamental, problem of politics. But despite the ever-present character of this problem, contemporary American society has increasingly become uncomfortable with questions about it. The modern blockbuster — defined as it often is by stories of superheroes, fairy tales, and sci-fi universes — so often speaks to us not about the frequently uneasy relationship between man and nature but about the human capacity to transcend the limitations of our natures, to become whatever it is we want to be.” (06/27/25)